In this article we consider the ways in which visual information is used as
a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical
tasks. We focus on the role of visual information in maintaining task awareness
and in achieving mutual understanding in conversation. We first describe the
theoretical framework we use to analyze the role of visual information in
physical collaboration. Then, we present two experiments that vary the amount
and quality of the visual information available to participants during a
collaborative bicycle repair task. We examine the effects of this visual
information on performance and on conversational strategies. We conclude with a
general discussion of how situational awareness and conversational grounding
are achieved in collaborative tasks and with some design considerations for
systems to support remote collaborative repair.

It is increasingly recognized that social interaction and collaboration rely
on the participants' abilities to access and use a range of resources including
objects and artifacts from within the immediate environment. In recent years,
system support for remote collaboration has begun to address this issue, and we
have witnessed the emergence of a number of technologies designed to provide
remote participants with access to (features of) each others' environment. In
this article we examine the use of one such system, an innovative mixed media
environment designed to enable participants to refer to and point at objects
and artifacts within each other's remote environment. The article addresses the
ways in which participants use the system to undertake various collaborative
activities and discusses the problems and issues that emerge, for the
participants' themselves, in coordinating action with and through objects. We
then consider these issues with regard to interaction and collaboration in more
conventional environments such as work settings, and we discuss the ways in
which the interpretation and production of action are inextricably embedded
within the immediate environment, an environment of action that is
inadvertently fractured in even this more sophisticated media space.

E-mail, far from being a poor, technically limited substitute for
face-to-face communication, has some unique and compelling properties that make
it ideally suited for talking about objects. In this article we show how e-mail
users have evolved new forms of electronic deictic references to refer to work
objects and have taken full advantage of the fluid boundaries between the
different roles that e-mail can assume. We also illustrate how e-mail users
draw on the persistence of the medium to make sense of the objects being talked
about and sometimes even transform the conversation itself into an object of
conversation. We conclude with several design suggestions for future electronic
mail software based on these findings.

Making the Organization Come Alive: Talking Through and About the Technology
in Remote Banking

Organizations have increasingly been seeking to interact with their
customers using more "remote channels" such as telephone and computer-based
technologies. This process has been a part of dramatic technological upheavals
as technology enters into customer interactions. This article examines examples
of this changing relationship, documenting the role of technology in delivering
banking services over remote channels. We present details from two ethnographic
studies concerning physical and digital representations of artifacts, talk, and
the organization of customer-facing work and their relevance in "designing for
the expanded interface." In telephone banking, sharing of objects and
reconciliation between different instantiations are achieved through
conversation. In video-conferencing, despite visual access to the same
artifact, operators still need to guide customers around objects, explaining
what they are seeing and what is happening. We look at the use of scripts
designed to standardize operator interactions, the demeanor work undertaken by
operators to account for the behavior of technology, attempts to configure
customer interactions, and issues of trust in such technologically mediated
communication.

This commentary reviews the existing research literature concerning support
for talking about objects in mediated communication, drawing three conclusions:
(a) speech alone is often sufficient for effective conversations; (b) visual
information about work objects is generally more valuable than visual
information about work participants; and (c) disjoint visual perspectives can
undermine communication processes. I then comment on the four articles in the
light of these observations, arguing that they broadly support these
observations. I discuss the paradoxical failure of current technologies to
support talk about objects, arguing that these need to be better integrated
with existing communication applications. I conclude by outlining a research
agenda for supporting talk about things, identifying outstanding theoretical,
empirical, and design issues.

Talking About Distributed Communication and Medicine: On Bringing Together
Remote and Local Actors

In this commentary we reflect on the articles in this special issue on
computer-mediated communication (CMC) "about things." We do this from our
perspective as researchers of the sociotechnical practices of developing,
using, and evaluating information technologies for health care work. The
relevance of the articles for a medical setting is evaluated, and we also
indicate that the material embeddedness of CMC should be "unpacked." By
focusing on the materiality of CMC in its working practice, we can see the
otherwise invisible work that performs the ecology needed to "make a CMC work."
Only when seeing these activities, and when realizing the risks of possible
miscommunications, can we assess the desirability and feasibility of
(telemedicine) CMC projects.

The articles in this special issue on "talking about things" address very
different aspects of conversations around objects in computer-mediated
collaborative environments. Although the authors have similar goals, they
differ widely in the part of the problem space they tackle. The authors choose
different ways to address common grounding and shared understanding in their
study plans and environments. The articles raise a paradox between the need to
see things while talking about them and the lack of demonstrated success when
doing so in CMC environments. When conversations include physical objects, a
computer-mediated collaborative environment must be able to allow a
representation and transformation of those objects in the conversation. The
extent to which this is accomplished in a way that minimizes the loss of shared
context and shared experience will provide the ability to talk about things
remotely in a useful way.

HCI 2003 Volume 18 Issue 3

Theory of Personalization of Appearance: Why Users Personalize Their PCs and
Mobile Phones

Three linked qualitative studies were performed to investigate why people
choose to personalize the appearance of their PCs and mobile phones and what
effects personalization has on their subsequent perception of those devices.
The 1st study involved 35 frequent Internet users in a 2-stage procedure. In
the 1st phase they were taught to personalize a commercial Web portal and then
a recommendation system, both of which they used in the subsequent few days. In
the 2nd phase they were allocated to 1 of 7 discussion groups to talk about
their experiences with these 2 applications. Transcripts of the discussion
groups were coded using grounded theory analysis techniques to derive a theory
of personalization of appearance that identifies (a) user-dependent,
system-dependent, and contextual dispositions; and (b) cognitive, social, and
emotional effects. The 2nd study concentrated on mobile phones and a different
user group. Three groups of Finnish high school students discussed the
personalization of their mobile phones. Transcripts of these discussions were
coded using the categories derived from the 1st study and some small
refinements were made to the theory in the light of what was said. Some
additional categories were added; otherwise, the theory was supported. In
addition, 3 independent coders, naive to the theory, analyzed the transcripts
of 1 discussion group each. A high degree of agreement with the investigators'
coding was demonstrated. In the 3rd study, a heterogeneous sample of 8 people
who used the Internet for leisure purposes were visited in their homes. The
degree to which they had personalized their PCs was found to be well predicted
by the dispositions in the theory. Design implications of the theory are
discussed.

Speech recognition technology continues to improve, but users still
experience significant difficulty using the software to create and edit
documents. In fact, a recent study confirmed that users spent 66% of their time
on correction activities and only 33% on dictation. Of particular interest is
the fact that one third of the users' time was spent simply navigating from one
location to another. In this article, we investigate the efficacy of
hands-free, speech-based navigation in the context of dictation-oriented
activities. We provide detailed data regarding failure rates, reasons for
failures, and the consequences of these failures. Our results confirm that
direction-oriented navigation (e.g., Move up two lines) is less effective than
target-oriented navigation (e.g. Select target). We identify the three most
common reasons behind the failure of speech-based navigation commands:
recognition errors, issuing of invalid commands, and pausing in the middle of
issuing a command. We also document the consequences of failed speech-based
navigation commands. As a result of this analysis, we identify changes that
will reduce failure rates and lessen the consequences of some remaining
failures. We also propose a more substantial set of changes to simplify
direction-based navigation and enhance the target-based navigation. The
efficacy of this final set of recommendations must be evaluated through future
empirical studies.

DENIM: An Informal Web Site Design Tool Inspired by Observations of Practice

Through a study of Web site design practice, we observed that designers
employ multiple representations of Web sites as they progress through the
design process and that these representations allow them to focus on different
aspects of the design. In particular, we observed that Web site designers focus
their design efforts at 3 different levels of granularity-site map, storyboard,
and individual page-and that designers sketch at all levels during the early
stages of design. Sketching on paper is especially important during the early
phases of a project, when designers wish to explore many design possibilities
quickly without focusing on low-level details. Existing Web design tools do not
support such exploration tasks well, nor do they adequately integrate multiple
site representations. Informed by these observations we developed DENIM: an
informal Web site design tool that supports early phase information and
navigation design of Web sites. It supports sketching input, allows design at
different levels of granularity, and unifies the levels through zooming.
Designers are able to interact with their sketched designs as if in a Web
browser, thus allowing rapid creation and exploration of interactive
prototypes. Based on an evaluation with professional designers as well as usage
feedback from users who have downloaded DENIM from the Internet, we have made
numerous improvements to the system and have received many positive reactions
from designers who would like to use a system like DENIM in their work.

HCI 2003 Volume 18 Issue 4

It has been suggested that computer interfaces could be made more usable if
their designers utilized cinematography techniques, which have evolved to guide
the viewer through a narrative despite frequent discontinuities in the
presented scene (i.e., cuts between shots). Because of differences between the
domains of film and interface design, it is not straightforward to understand
how such techniques can be transferred. May and Barnard (1995) argued that a
psychological model of watching film could support such a transference. This
article presents an extended account of this model, which allows identification
of the practice of collocation of objects of interest in the same screen
position before and after a cut. To verify that filmmakers do, in fact, use
such techniques successfully, eye movements were measured while participants
watched the entirety of a commercially released motion picture, in its original
theatrical format. For each of 10 classes of cut, predictions were made about
the use of collocation. Peaks in eye movements between 160 and 280 msec after
the cut were detected for 6 of the 10 classes, and results were broadly in line
with collocation predictions, with two exceptions. It is concluded that
filmmakers do successfully use collocation when cutting in and out from a
detail, following the motion of an actor or object, and in showing the result
of an action. The results are used to make concrete recommendations for
interface designers from the theoretical analysis of film comprehension.

Ineffective systems requirements determination (SRD) has been a major
problem in information systems delivery. Researchers have linked this problem
to poor communication among systems designers and users. Several facilitated
group techniques have been used to bring system developers, users, and managers
together. These approaches have generally outperformed the traditional
interviewing method. However, these group meetings are typically conducted with
freely interacting group techniques (FIGT), which are prone to some of the
classical relational problems and make successful outcomes critically reliant
on excellent facilitation. The nominal group technique, which was designed to
reduce the impact of negative group dynamics, is proposed as a crutch to help
reduce the facilitator's burden of controlling relational problems during SRD.
This approach, which was tested empirically in a laboratory experiment,
appeared to outperform FIGT in the areas tested and seemed to contribute to
excellent group outcomes even with less than excellent facilitation.

This article discusses the design of Concept Mapped Project-Based Activity
Scaffolding System (CoMPASS) and the theoretical foundations that it is based
on. CoMPASS is a hypertext system that presents students with external,
graphical representations in the form of concept maps as well as textual
representations both of which change dynamically as students traverse through
the domain and make navigational decisions. In a study in which middle school
students used CoMPASS, students' navigation paths, as well as their learning
outcomes, were analyzed. A comparison class in which students used the system
without the maps for navigation provided information about students' use of the
maps for navigation and its effect on their learning. It was found that
students who used the maps version of the system performed significantly better
in a concept mapping test as well as an essay test, and their navigation was
more focused. This article discusses the findings of the study and its
implications for designing hypertext systems.